Oh! Sheep (iOS) Review

Date

10/22/2012

In Short

A challenging line-drawing puzzle game that loses a few points for some of its frustration-inducing tendencies...

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By Ned Jordan

Oh! Sheep is a Spy Mouse inspired line-drawing puzzle game, with a convoluted
nonsensical storyline that I'll just skip attempting to summarize.' The
goal in each of the game's levels is to get the sheep from their starting
positions to the UFO teleporters that will whisk them away from the screen by
drawing a line with your finger from each sheep to its destination.' Well,
it's not really as easy as that for several reasons.' The first is that
each sheep can only be transported by a teleporter of the same color as its
wool, and the only way to change wool color is to eat one of the colored berries
in the level - each of which can only be consumed once.' Also, any given
level will have its share of obstacles, some of which are quite deadly, that
prevent the sheep from making a beeline to the exits.' And then there are
the coins scattered around the screen that must be collected if you want to
three-star the level.' Lastly, the sheep movements must also be coordinated since
there are things to contend with like gates that are opened by the
correspondingly colored switch.

The first few levels are pretty easy, but the difficulty begins to ramp up
quickly from there.' The order and timing of your sheep actions soon
becomes critical to solving a level, and it's entirely possible to make a wrong
move that you won't be able to overcome without restarting the level.'
Making things even trickier is that the game requires you to position some of
the sheep very precisely (something that's particularly difficult to do when
playing the game on an iPhone) and being a touch off can screw up your timing or
force you to make last minute desperate adjustments to a sheep's path.'
While I really liked that the puzzles can be pretty challenging, I didn't enjoy
having to restart a level because a sheep stopped right next to a switch and sat
there staring at it.' The game is also pretty stingy in awarding three star
ratings for completing levels.' You get one for collecting all of the
coins, one for beating (a rather aggressive) par time, and one for completing
the level drawing fewer than the target number of lines.' Trying to get all
three of these stars can require a level of precision that doesn't quite seem
possible on the game's crowded screens, which saps some of the potential fun
from the game that could be had from replaying previously completed levels.